Pilsen, Chicago

Last night, after surviving a hot day, I took a nice and paced bike ride around the neighborhood. It was past midnight and still very warm, but there was a comforting breeze. Almost no one was outside anymore. I passed by several landmarks built by the Czechs, when they were the majority in the 'hood, and that inspired me to blog again. Since there are many such landmarks, and I'm aware of five, this won't be an extremely brief entry.

Thalia Hall on 18th and Allport used to be a theater with apartments upstairs. Now the downstairs is empty, no one is using it, but there are apartments or condos above. The building really stands out, I believe it's Neo-Classicist, but it doesn't look like the severe American Neo-Classicism (like in DC) to me, it's more flowery than that. Architecturally illiterate as I am, I'll refrain from any other remarks.

Dvorak park (roughly Cullerton and May) was named after the Czech classical hit-maker Antonin Dvorak. It's a beautiful little park, it even has two swimming pools, one for adults, one for kids, but no lifeguard, so the pools are not open to the public. So, basically, both of these landmarks--Dvorak Park and Thalia Hall--are half-languishing. Couldn't the well-to-do people moving into the 'hood, along with the local community leaders etc., do something to finance the full revival of these public facilities? I'll keep dreaming.

St. Procopuis church, Allport and 18th, now has service in Spanish and English, while their web site says: "Welcome! - ¡Bienvenidos! - Dobro došli!" I'm guessing they believe that the latter greeting is in Czech (they talk about the Czechs building and initially congregating in the church), but of course it should be vitame vas! Dobro dosli is in Bosnian/Croatia/Montengrin/Serbian. Anyway, St. Procopius also runs a nearby elementary school on Allport, another old building that has a stone plaque in Czech: Nechte maličkých přijít ke mně, or Let the little ones come to me. Google says it's a quote from Jesus.

Another elementary school, only public, Perez School (19th and Allport) used to be Komensky School, which is what the stone plaque still says. Jan Komensky was a Czech and European renaissance education reformer. If I remember correctly from my undergrad studies, the guy wrote the first ever illustrated Latin textbook, aimed at teaching Latin not through endless memorization, dictation, and physical punishment, but through gradual acquisition of vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, etc. He did for education what Gelilei did for science, or Descartes for philosophy.

All of those landmarks can be found in a rectangle of four by three blocks. Czechs have never been a numerous population anywhere, but from the late 18th century all the way to the end of WWI, when they finally got their nation-state (together with the Slovaks, of course) they went through a huge national revival that obviously had strong ripple effects in the diaspora. And the Midwest was a favorite destination. Voila Pilsen.

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John Doe Live

On 7/15, I saw John Doe at a place called Abbey's Pub. Often times you tolerate the voice of a singer-songwriter if the songs are good. Other times, I suppose, you tolerate a so-so song if the singer is really good. But John Doe just delivers and delivers. He is a kind of a crooner, but without any slickness of course. His voice is not _meant_ to be seductive or sexy, it's simply his natural, unaffected voice, and in fact it's a very convincing vehicle for the sad and/or angry songs that he writes (often with a sense of humor), but that's why it's seductive all the more. In his lyrics, he handles the subtleties, sounds, and ambiguities of language in a way that pushes the limits of a rock/country/blues/whatever song format without ever exploding it. His whole approach seems to me like a perfect combo of respect for and irreverence of (music) tradition.

Sonic Youth Daydream Nation

On Friday the 13th of this July, I saw Sonic Youth perform their 1987 album Daydream Nation in its entirety at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago's Union Park. I know the album by heart, which came in handy when it turned out that the sound was bad (muted, low), so I was able to fill in, from memory, the stuff that didn't reach me from the stage. I soon forgot that the sound was bad: they performed with much nerve, muscle, tendon, cardiovascular system, etc. I danced and sang, and afterward, as I rode my bicycle back home, propelled by the music-induced adrenalin, I still sang the songs along the emptied streets on my route--Ashland, Jackson, Halsted, 18th.

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Jon Dee Graham...

...is a veteran singer songwriter (but new to me) from Austin, TX, whom I saw live for the first time last night in Cleveland, OH. He sang many of his songs with a self-deprecating attitude, nothing-is-sacred-to-me attitude in fact, which is how I like it. His voice has grown very gravelly over the past thirty years he's been whoring around, but it suits the combination of cynicism and melancholy in his songs. One of the new songs he played is about a guy who is sent to a rehab or prison, where he meets "junkies and strugglers," and remembers how Neil Young got it all wrong in "Needle and the Damage Done," and concludes he's/they're "not beautifully broken, just broken, that's all." The song resembles the 1996 "Something Broken in the Promised Land" by Wayne Kramer so much--not just music, but the key word "broken" and the reference to the same N.Y. song--that it cannot be a coincidence. Kramer's song is about how fucked up things were/are in the U.S., and Graham complains specifically about our tendency to romanticize "junkies and strugglers" (all the while marginalizing, incarcerating them, etc.) On the other hand, Graham didn't indicate where his inspiration for the song came from. Should I care? I love both the songs.